The Boy Who Followed Ripley (Ripley, #4)

by Patricia Highsmith

Sometimes Heloise half understood what was going on, and the half that she did not know, she didn’t want to know. All to the good.

Would he have been impressed by these jewels at the age of twenty-six, when he had been with Dickie Greenleaf in Mongibello? Maybe, but strictly by the monetary value of the objects. And that was bad enough. But now he wasn’t even impressed by that. He had improved.

Every mistake in life, Tom thought, had to be met by an attitude, either the right attitude or the wrong one, a constructive or self-destructive attitude. What was tragedy for one man was not for another, if he could assume the right attitude toward it.

Tom didn’t want to remark that Frank would probably be in love with seventeen more girls before he found the one he might finally marry.

They used one another’s telephones, houses, lives sometimes, and somehow it all evened out.

“We’ll let the boy sleep, of course. Isn’t he a nice-looking boy!” Tom smiled. “You think so? Yes. Rather handsome and unaware of it. That’s always attractive.”

“Mr. Ripley, we don’t know the details, but . . .” You never will, Tom thought, and barely listened to what followed from Thurlow.

There was a limit to what Heloise should know, and Tom knew it as if it were a mark on a scale.

“You are not telling me everything.” Heloise was not angry, not taunting, but something between the two.

“I feel like losing myself. It’s not so much killing myself as losing myself. That’s because of Teresa—I think. If I could just vaporize like steam—you know?”

Every generation seemed to have to turn loose of something, and then try desperately to find something new to hang onto.

He could feel Thurlow regarding him as if he were a man from Mars, possibly also regarding him with distaste. Tom didn’t mind at all. He had weathered worse than Thurlow.

Tom tried reading, snoozing, thinking—though it was not always good to try to think. Inspiration, good or productive ideas seldom came that way.

Lily glanced toward the windows as if the business might have been a big black storm coming up outside.

Odd, Tom thought, that some girls meant sadness and death. Some girls looked like sunlight, creativity, joy, but they really meant death, and not even because the girls were enticing their victims, in fact one might blame the boys for being deceived by—nothing at all, simply imagination.